Nationalize the drug companies

Eli Lilly just announced they are coming out with a generic version of their insulin drug humalog. congress held hearings last month to ask why a drub thats been around 100 years costs 275/vial. 20 years ago it was $21/vial. its estimated to coast 78-133/year to make the drug.

its time to put an end to this. nationalize the drug companies. or else start revoking their patents.
allow importation of drugs from other companies.
impose a huge income tax on the drug companies with the revenue used to partially fund medicare for all

That woulds make things worse… See Venezuela…

I would go so far as to nationalizing the drug companies… but revoking patents and allowing importation would help a lot.

Also use Medicare/Medicaid to put downward pressure on common drugs.

Thats woulds makes things worsers! Venezualia! FEARS!

You may not know they nationalized industry there, and it’s falling apart…

You think healthcare is “industry”… bizarre

In the midst of several horrible proposals, we get the one brilliant proposal.

Why can companies do this sort of thing at all?

In a truly free market, it would obviously be impossible.

ONLY a grant of government privilege, i.e. a patent, can permit such behavior to occur. And because it is possible to make a relatively trivial change and re-patent, companies can double down on this sort of thing for years on end.

Patents were envisioned to aid the progress of science. But in the modern era, they have been used to distort the free market. Government is the enabler and thus more guilty than the drug companies, though the companies bear their moral share for exploiting the opportunity that government handed them.

Patents should be reduced in length and renewals prohibited for trivial changes. The drug approval process should be streamlined and patients should have the absolute right, at their full and exclusive risk, to use unapproved drugs or drugs from foreign suppliers. This would undercut domestic prices.

But we must acknowledge that government privilege, as it always is, is the ultimate source of this market distortion.

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Opposed. Just hold their patents hostage after X amount of years.

A question in need of answering: how are patents distinct from physical property as “government privilege”? Why does a “truly free market” lack patents instead of having them?

(Alerting @7ranz and @H_Arendt.)

Physical property is defensible. It can be protected by the owner or by the agent or agent’s of the owner.

Ideas can never be property in the true sense of that term. With the grant of government privilege known as a patent, they become “psuedo-property”. They are defensible, not by the owner, but by the government as the sole agent of the owner and only for the time length dictated by the government.

Without patents, ideas would not be property in any manner. As soon as somebody figured out what you were doing or came up with the idea independently on their own, they could compete with you.

An idea can never be property in the true sense of the term property. It becomes psuedo-property ONLY because of the grant of government privilege known as the patent, for the stated time length.